


all the doors and the lights in the hall

by mimizans



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Aromantic Character, Asexual Character, Campaign: Fantasy High (Dimension 20), First Time, Gen, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:42:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23528605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimizans/pseuds/mimizans
Summary: Realizing that you don’t care about sex when it’s all your friends care about is a tricky prospect. There’s a temptation to put yourself above them, to convince yourself that you’re simply too mature to be hung up on sex and dating, that you have better things to think about, like your schoolwork or your college applications or your part-time job as a licensed private investigator. That’s easy, because it lets you imagine that one day, when everyone else is as mature as you are, you’ll all care about sex a normal amount and the fact that you’ve never once imagined yourself engaging in it will be irrelevant, because everything will be as it should be.It’s not true, of course.--What it means to be queer and in love with your best friend when you're eighteen and nothing makes sense, least of all your feelings.
Relationships: Adaine Abernant & Riz Gukgak, Kristen Applebees & Riz Gukgak, Riz Gukgak/Fabian Aramais Seacaster
Comments: 46
Kudos: 256





	all the doors and the lights in the hall

**Author's Note:**

> this is drawn heavily from own experiences with asexuality and aromanticism and being gay in high school when everything feels like the end of the world. 
> 
> title from "about" by another michael.

Realizing that you don’t care about sex when it’s all your friends care about is a tricky prospect. There’s a temptation to put yourself above them, to convince yourself that you’re simply too mature to be hung up on sex and dating, that you have better things to think about, like your schoolwork or your college applications or your part-time job as a licensed private investigator. That’s easy, because it lets you imagine that one day, when everyone else is as mature as you are, you’ll all care about sex a normal amount and the fact that you’ve never once imagined yourself engaging in it will be irrelevant, because everything will be as it should be.

It’s not true, of course, and Riz is insightful enough to disabuse himself of that notion. Their Spring Break adventure had made it abundantly clear that adults, no matter how old they are, are just as into sex as his teenage friends, and that the only thing that seems to change with the years is the amount of structural damage you can cause by sleeping with someone you shouldn’t. 

High school ticks away, and Riz watches his friends do intricate dances, dating and breaking up and making up and breaking up again: Kristen and Tracker crying at opposite sides of a party, Fig and Ayda sitting on the hood of a car sharing a blanket, Fabian and Aelwen hooking up for the third ill-advised time. His careful eyes track them, their movements and emotions, but he can’t find any pattern in them. He can’t find any thread that makes his own lack of interest make sense. He is happy when his friends are happy, and sad when they are sad, and he joins in to make fun of exes with the same glee as the rest, but as much as he tries to he can’t understand them.

Adaine is a blessing. She seems as confused by their friends as he does, the two of them raising their eyebrows in unison and staying home on Saturday nights. He asks her about it once, this weird disconnect they share, and she says, “I simply don’t understand. Sex is fine, I assume, but I don’t need to have it. Not now. Not ever, maybe, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.” She’s 17, her hair longer than it’s ever been, swinging in pale golden sheets around her shoulders. “I don’t really want to date anyone either.”

“Not ever?” Riz asks, laying back against the soft pillows on Adaine’s bed.

“I don’t think so,” Adaine says. She puts down her pen and turns to face him in her desk chair, a faint line creasing her forehead. “It all seems so messy, frankly, and can’t think of anyone I’d want to kiss or hold hands with or any of that. Have you?”

Riz thinks for a moment, and can only come up with one name. “Fabian,” he admits with a sigh, and watches Adaine’s eyes go wide. “But that’s never going to happen.”

“Because he doesn’t like guys?” Adaine asks, tilting her head.

“Because of that, and because of Aelwen, and because even if both of those things weren’t major stumbling blocks, I don’t know if I really want to - to date someone, or if I just want to be normal.”

Adaine nods and doesn’t try to tell him that he’s normal. It’s normal, he knows that, he’s normal, his dad told him he was normal for not wanting these things and he’s been clinging to that like a lifeline ever since - but sometimes he wishes he were just a little more normal, you know? That he felt the things that everyone else seems to feel, and wanted the things that everyone else seems to desperately want. Dating doesn’t seem as out-of-this-world to him as sex does, but is that just because he’s seen enough movies that he thinks he can play along in a romantic relationship? What if he does want to have sex, and he just hasn’t met the right person yet, and when he does all he’ll want is to have sex with them and this whole period of his life will seem like a bad dream? Riz has been known to overthink things, and nothing more than this. His head feels like a bear trap these days, constantly snapping closed and destroying whatever fragile consensus he’s come to with strange new feelings and hypotheticals. 

“I’m not gonna say that you should talk to him about it,” Adaine says carefully, her patrician accent a soft counterpoint to the sharp edges of his mind, “because I doubt that you will and I’d just be wasting my breath. But I don’t think you should second-guess yourself on everything.”

“Huh?” Riz asks, uncharacteristically unarticulate. 

“All you can do is go with what feels correct now. If that changes later, then it changes. I don’t think the answers are going to come to you just from thinking about them, and they’ll probably come a little at a time.”

“So start with ‘I want to kiss Fabian’ and work my way out from there?” Riz asks, raising his eyebrows at her. 

“Exactly. What have you got to lose?” Adaine asks breezily, and turns back to her homework.

“A lot, Adaine,” Riz replies. “He’s... important to me. Beyond this.”

Adaine stills, but doesn’t look up. “I know,” she says, but doesn’t elaborate, and Riz goes back to staring at Aelwen’s bunk above him, his eyes unfocused.

It’s not that he thinks Fabian would be mad at him, or would judge him. He’s never said a word to make Riz think that he wouldn’t be a completely safe person to come out to. But he knows that as soon as he says, “Fabian, I would like to date you,” there’s going to be a lot of follow-up questions that he doesn’t have answers to. _Is he gay?_ Maybe. _Is he bi?_ Maybe. _What does he want out of a relationship?_ In general? He has no idea. Specifically out of a relationship with Fabian? To call him every night and hold his hand and kiss him softly and have that be okay. _Does he want to have sex?_ Not actively, no. _Would he have sex if Fabian wanted to have sex with him?_ Maybe? Probably? He has no idea, and it feels irresponsible to dump his revelations on Fabian without really knowing what they are. 

So he doesn’t tell Fabian. Not yet. Not for another year. Not until they’ve all gone to senior prom. (Riz with Adaine and Fabian by himself. He’d danced with Fabian at prom, because Fabian had asked, and they hadn’t made eye contact during the entire three minute song.) Not until they’ve been to the last of graduation parties. (Fig’s, which had the most parent attendees but was still the most raucous. They play spin the bottle, and Riz is both disappointed and relieved that he and Fabian never land on each other.) Not until they’re all packing up to go to college. (Well, most of them. Kristen still isn’t sure, and Fig seems trepidatious, and Fabian - he’s taking a year off, going to stay with his mother’s family in Fallinel, maybe take some more levels in bard.)

They’d been on a party call, all of them, draining their parents’ minutes by talking to each other late into the night. Eventually, everyone had hung up, tired and deliriously happy in the way that only teeangers on the brink of adulthood can be. Riz stays on the line, listening to each of their dear voices as they say goodnight and hang up, until it’s just him and Fabian. 

There’s the sound of soft breathing, and then Fabian says, “The Ball, are you going to miss me while I’m gone?” His voice is quiet, his tone introspective, and Riz can’t bring himself to lie to his best friend.

“More than you know,” he replies, and doesn’t let his voice shake.

Fabian laughs, pleased, and they stay on the phone into the small hours of the morning. They talk about the little things, gossip and college acceptances and what classes Riz is signed up for during the summer term, and the big things, like Riz’s worry that his mom won’t be able to make rent without his extra income to help out and Fabian’s nightmares about not living up to his father’s expectations of him, even after all these years. It’s cathartic and intimate, full of the kinds of things that you can only say when you’re young and it’s too early in the morning and you’re talking to someone you care about. It feels like there’s a spell cast over the moment, like Tracker’s Twilight Sanctuary, keeping them safe from the outside world even as the sky starts to lighten outside.

“Why did you never date anyone at Aguefort?” Fabian asks, his voice warm in Riz’s ear. “I know there were people who were into you.”

“Oh, you know,” Riz says, feeling his heart speed up. “There was just never anyone that I liked that liked me back. Not that I, uh, have those feelings for people often.”

“But you have liked someone? Other than Baron, of course,” Fabian says, already chuckling at his own joke. 

“Good bit,” Riz replies. “Never stops being funny. And, uh, yes, I have liked someone. Do like someone.”

“Who?” Fabian asks, point blank, and Riz should’ve known he wouldn’t get to dance his way around telling Fabian when it came down to it. 

Riz takes a deep breath and says, “Well, let me preface this by saying that I have no idea what this means for me and I’m still very confused about relationships and sex and all that stuff, but that when I think about being in a relationship and, um, kissing, and maybe s-sex, the only person that I think about doing those things with is, uh, you.”

“Me?” Fabian asks, and Riz wishes he could see his face right now, because his tone is impossible to read over the phone.

“Yes, and I don’t expect you to reciprocate that or anything, and I know that you’re leaving and this was the absolute worst time to drop this on you and I’m sorry for that, but I didn’t want to end high school without telling you that I like you a lot and -”

“Riz.” Fabian’s voice cuts across Riz’s increasingly breathless monologue. “Do you want to come over?”

“Now?” Riz manages to squeak out.

“Yes, now,” Fabian replies, the words rushing out so fast that he almost hisses them, like he’s embarrassed that Riz didn’t catch his meaning in the first place and mad that he now has to show his hand. 

Even in the golden haze of hasty 3 a.m. decisions and high school infatuations, Riz pauses a moment to take stock. He knows what Fabian is asking him. If he goes over to Seacaster Manor, they’re going to kiss, and they’re probably going to have sex, and then Fabian is going to leave and go to Fallinel. Can Riz say yes to that? Can he say no?

Fabian makes the decision for him when he says, “I’ll like to see you,” in that oddly soft way he has sometimes, like he’s feeling something so deeply that it’s hard for him to admit he’s feeling it at all.

“Of course,” Riz says, the words slipping out of his mouth with an aura of inevitability. “I’m leaving now. Is it okay if, I, uh, hang up? Just because I have to climb out onto the fire escape if I don’t want to wake my mom and -”

“Yes, yes, of course, I’ll see you soon,” Fabian assures him, and then the call is ended. Riz’s phone is warm in his hand and he clutches it tightly as he opens his windows and shimmies out onto the rusty fire escape. He could probably leave through the front door - he’s stealthy enough that he doubts his mom would wake up - but there’s something fun about leaving through the window. It feels rebellious and ill-advised, like the other things he’s about to do.

He wishes Gilear still lived here so he could just hot wire his car, but as it is he has to take the night bus downtown and walk the three blocks to Seacaster Manor. The house’s mast is visible well before Riz is walking down Fabian’s street, his hands in his pockets to ward off the chill. He’s barely on the doorstep before Fabian throws the manor’s wide front doors open. He must’ve been sitting at one of the windows, watching for Riz to come up the street, and the thought makes Riz’s ears burn. “Hi,” Riz says.

“Hi,” Fabian replies. He just stands there, looking at Riz like he’s never seen him before.

“Can I, uh, come in?” Riz tries, when it doesn’t look like Fabian is going to do anything.

Fabian blinks his one good eye and seems to snap out of his stupor. Riz can see a golden flush spreading down his chest. “Aha! Yes, of course,” Fabian says, stepping aside so that Riz can enter. Riz enters the manor’s softly glowing interior, its opulent light fixtures all equipped with dimmer switches. He’s glad they’re not standing in bright light right now. He thinks that might break the spell. 

“Let’s go to my room,” Fabian says, like this is a completely normal thing that they’ve done a million times before, like Riz can’t see the color in his cheeks or the sweat beading along his hairline. It’s completely not normal though, because Fabian reaches out a hand and takes one of Riz’s, slotting their fingers together.

“Oh,” Riz says, because he feels like he has to say something.

“Is that - alright?” Fabian asks.

“Yes, uh, definitely okay,” Riz sputters out, and lets a red-faced Fabian lead him up the grand staircase. He doesn’t ask where Fabian’s mother is; he doesn’t particularly care, and he doubts Hallariel would intervene even if she knew what they were about to do. Riz swallows.

Once they’re in Fabian’s too-large bedroom, the door-closed behind them, Fabian turns and says, “Did you mean it? What you said on the phone?”

“Of course,” Riz says, squeezing the hand still in his. 

“Okay,” Fabian says, exhaling through his mouth. “Okay, okay. I’ve thought about those things with you, too.”

“Really?”

“Duh,” Fabian darts down to kiss Riz like he can’t help it. Riz barely has time to kiss back before Fabian is pulling away, looking shocked at his own daring. 

It makes Riz smile, and that makes Fabian smile back at him, and then they’re both laughing, and Riz jumps up into Fabian’s arms like he’s been doing since he was fourteen, but now it’s to lean in and kiss Fabian on the mouth. Fabian kisses back, one hand on Riz’s lower back and the other wrapped around Riz’s shoulders. Riz has limited kissing exposure, but he thinks he could get used to this feeling - breathing in Fabian’s air, the subtle movements of their lips against each other, being close enough to see every one of Fabian’s eyelashes. 

Fabian falls backwards on his bed and it’s difficult and bouncy for a moment, but then Fabian is smiling up from underneath him and Riz goes back to kissing with abandon, pressing his lips everywhere he can reach, across Fabian’s jaw and down his neck. 

“The Ball, the Ball,” Fabian is saying breathlessly, and then, when that fails, “Riz.”

Riz looks up at Fabian, temporarily distracted from where he’s been kissing Fabian’s collarbones, lovely and fully visible thanks to Fabian’s tank top. “Hm?”

“Do you want to?” Riz knows what he’s asking. Knows that he could stop right now, or say no and just keep kissing Fabian, and either would be fine. Also knows Fabian is leaving for another country, and Riz won’t get to see him in person for a long time, and that he wants to be close to Fabian in whatever way he can - including sex, if it’s available to him. Judging from the way Fabian is gazing hazily up at him, Riz concludes that sex is very much on the table.

“Yes,” Riz says. “I do. But I never have before, you’ll have to show me.” Fabian nods. He sits up and kisses Riz, then rolls them over on the bed so that Riz is beneath him.

After it’s done, Riz can see why other people seem to like sex just for the sake of it. The sensations are novel, and the pleasurable frissons he gets when Fabian kisses his neck are astounding. He can imagine himself feeling those kinds of touches again, in some far-flung future. He doesn’t know that he’ll ever _want_ it, _need_ it like other people seem to, but it’s nice. It’s nice with Fabian, at least. More even then the sensations, he likes the noises that Fabian makes during sex, the crinkle between his eyebrows when he’s hovering over Riz, the sounds of his breathing and the heat of his skin. Sex may not be for him, Riz thinks, but Fabian is. 

They lay in bed next to each other, their arms still touching. Fabian is glowing in the light from his bedside table lamp, and when he turns to look at Riz his silvery hair flops onto the pillow. “Was that... good?” he asks.

“Yes,” Riz says, closing his eyes and letting himself sink further into Fabian’s ridiculously comfortable bed. “Thank you,” he adds belatedly. He thinks maybe that’s not what you say after this sort of thing, but it’s true.

“No, thank _you_ ,” Fabian says, and manages to sound both smarmy and sweet at the same time.

Riz opens his eyes and turns towards Fabian. He studies his face, cataloguing every detail for when Fabian is away and Riz can’t see him. He’s familiar with Fabian’s face, of course - he’s seen it nearly every day for four years - but he’s never gotten to study him from so close up before. He puts a hand on Fabian’s face, traces the strong line of his nose, his cheekbones, his brow, the swell of his upper lip. He must get lost in it, because eventually Fabian asks, “What are you doing?” with the hint of a laugh in his voice. This close, Riz can almost feel his chest rumble with it.

“Remembering you,” Riz replies. “I don’t... I don’t think this can be a thing, after tonight. I think it will be too hard.”

“We missed our window, huh?” Fabian reaches out and threads a hand through Riz’s curly hair. 

“For now,” Riz says. He pushes up into Fabian’s hand. He can’t help it. “Maybe we’ll get another chance.”

“Can I tell you a secret, the Ball?” Fabian whispers. “I hope we do.”

Riz has to leave eventually, because if it gets to be too late in the morning and he hasn’t come out of his room his mom _will_ get worried. Fabian drives him home. Riz holds on tight to Fabian’s waist and thinks, _I’m on the back of a motorcycle with a boy I like._ It’s so classic high school that he has to laugh, smothering the sound in Fabian’s jacket as the city rushes past them. 

Fabian drops him at the end of the block so that no one in Riz’s building hears the distinctive roar of the Hangman. They kiss goodbye, uncaring that Fabian is technically parked in a fire lane, their mouths moving slowly against each other.

“Okay,” Riz says, pulling away. His hands drop from Fabian’s lapels. “I’ll see you later. Keep in touch, okay?”

“Of course,” Fabian says, in that stuffy, stilted way he has when he’s feeling awkward. “Goodbye.” He leans in swiftly and kisses Riz one last time, probably a little harder than he meant to, and then kicks the bike into gear and speeds away. Riz resists the urge to touch his lips.

He gets back into his room with no trouble, sliding the window shut noiselessly behind him. The spell is wearing off now; the bright fingers of the morning are spreading across the sky and Fabian is leaving tomorrow. Riz sits on his bed and stares at the wall until his mom knocks on the door to call him to breakfast.

It doesn’t occur to him that there might be something wrong until his mom’s sharp eyes catch his hands shaking. He tries to bring his spoon up to his mouth but can’t quite make it, the milk sloshing out and dribbling down his hand.

“Sweetheart, are you okay?” his mom asks, resting her own spoon in her bowl. Her eyes narrow and he watches as she watches him, cataloging all the ways that he’s different from the last time she saw him. He knows when she clocks the hickey on his neck, the mottled green-brown bruise left by Fabian’s mouth, because her eyes go wide.

“You know, mom, I’m not sure,” Riz says, and it’s a miracle that his voice doesn’t shake.

“What happened?” She reaches out and gently takes the spoon from his hand, laying it back in the sad, soggy remains of his cereal.

Riz takes a deep, shuddery breath. “I snuck out last night and I went to Fabian’s house.” It’s true and it’s a start. He figures his mom’s a detective. She’ll know the right questions to ask.

“Okay.” Her brow creases further. “Why didn’t you just leave me a note or send a text? You know I don’t mind if you go to a friend’s house as long as I know where you’ve gone.”

Riz shrugs. “I don’t know. It felt wrong, I guess, because I wasn’t going there for the usual reasons.”

His mom doesn’t say anything. She just looks at him, waiting for him to continue. He does, his voice finally starting to shake. “You know he’s leaving tomorrow, right? For a year. I don’t know when I’ll see him next. Adaine told me junior year that I should tell him, but I didn’t, and then I did, last night, and he asked me to come over, and I did, and I just wanted to badly to be close to him, so we had sex. And then we decided that we couldn’t start anything because he’s leaving and he dropped me back off here on his stupid devil motorcycle and kissed me goodbye!” Riz realizes abruptly that his voice has been steadily rising in volume. There are tears at the colors of his eyes. He keeps going. “I feel so stupid, because if I’d done this a year ago maybe we’d be together now and we could handle being apart, or we’d have already broken up and I’d hate him and it wouldn’t matter. But, no, I’m stuck with all these feelings for him that I don’t understand and him in another country full of beautiful elves for a year!”

His mom is quiet for a moment. Then she says, “Do you wish you hadn’t slept with him?” There’s no judgment in her voice.

“No,” Riz says. “Maybe. No. I don’t regret it, I think. I just... wish that it would’ve happened at a different time.”

His mom smiles sadly. “When he would be here to process it with you?”

Riz’s shoulders sag. “It feels so big. For me. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever have sex and now I have and he’s leaving. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever feel - _romantic_ things for someone and now I do and he’s leaving. It’s not his fault. It’s just... bad timing.”

“I’m sorry, honey,” his mom says. She puts a gentle hand on his shoulder. “I wish there was a way I could make this not hurt as much.”

“Me too,” Riz says.

His mom sits at the kitchen table with him until she’s almost late for her shift. Riz tells her about his conversations with Adaine, and his conversation with Fabian, and his conversation with his dad. He tells her about what he’s feeling, and what he thought he would be feeling, the gulf of difference between them. His mom interjects when she needs to but mostly listens, a silent mirror for him to bounce off of. Once he’s talked himself out, she gathers up their bowls and places them in the sink. “Call me if you need me, alright?” she tells him after she kisses him on the forehead. “Call Adaine or Kristen or whoever you think will make this easier.”

“Thanks, mom,” Riz says. “I love you.”

“I love you too, sweetheart.”

He does call Kristen, because she’s messy in her emotions in a way that feels comforting right now. He feels simultaneously sunken and adrift, and he doesn’t think he could handle Adaine’s clear eyes. He needs to sit with Kristen, who walks the world with a smile on her face and joyous doubt and confusion in her heart, and be messy and dumb and young in all the ways he pretends he isn’t. 

Kristen sits and listens to him, her freckled hands holding his. She starts crying when he does, tears spilling from her eyes and her lips trembling. It’s nice, Riz finds, to sit with a friend and cry about a boy. It’s something he hasn’t had the opportunity to do until now. His mom’s adultness had tempered his rawness somehow; when she was there, he could remember that there were objectively bigger things in the world than whether he was able to kiss Fabian Seacaster again. With Kristen, though, he can wallow in how big the heartbreak feels, the enormity of what’s happened, the feeling that nothing will ever be the same again. Kristen understands innately, in the way that she so often does. 

They lay on the floor of Riz’s bedroom and look up at his spackled ceiling. Riz tells Kristen everything he told his mom and more, like how it had felt to have Fabian’s strong hands on him and how much he’d thrilled to be able to touch Fabian in return. He tells Kristen about not knowing if he likes all boys, or just this one specific boy, and if he’s earned the right to call himself gay. He tells her about how he doesn’t know if he’ll ever feel like this for someone again, or if he even wants to, and not in that dramatic teenager way. He tells her about how sex was weird and good and nothing like he thought it would be, and how the part he liked the most was the look that it put on Fabian’s face. 

Kristen turns her head to look at Riz. “Wow,” she says. “I didn’t know all that about you. I’m sorry I never asked.”

“Not your fault.” He shrugs his shoulders as best he can when they’re pressed against the floor. “I kind of kept it on lockdown.”

“Still,” Kristen says, rolling on her side to face him. “You know it’s okay to not have everything figured out, right? There’s no blueprints for the right way to be queer.”

“I get that, intellectually,” Riz says. “But it’s hard to know it when it seems to be so easy for everyone else. I mean, you kissed Tracker one time and knew you were gay. I’ve known that I liked Fabian for four years and I have no idea what to call myself or how to categorize the things I feel.”

“Normal,” Kristen says, shaking her wild ginger hair. “I still wake up some days and think that I’m lying to myself - that I made this all up for attention and that I like boys after all. Sometimes I don’t know if I’m a girl at all, and if I don’t feel like a girl, can I still call myself a lesbian?” Kristen sighs. “Nobody gets out of the queer meatgrinder for free. We have to unlearn all the things we’ve been taught our whole lives about what it means to love and have sex and conceptualize ourselves. You’re not the only one going through this, not by a longshot.”

Kristen trails off, playing with the hem of her t-shirt, and Riz smiles. “You’ve been reading again, haven’t you?”

Kristen shrugs. “Ayda keeps leaving her big heavy queer theory books around the house and they have pictures of women kissing on the front. What, am I supposed to NOT read them?”

“No, you should read them, and then you should give them to me to read.”

“Well,” Kristen says, “I’m sure Ayda will be happy to let you borrow them. After all, being gay: when you’re here...” She looks at him expectantly and puts her hand out.

Riz takes it. “You’re family.” 

“You got it,” Kristen says. She squeezes his hand. “You’re gonna be okay, you know. He’s going to Fallinel, not the moon. You’re still going to be able to talk to him.”

“I know,” Riz replies. “But he’s going to be off doing exciting things with people more interesting than me.”

“One, you're plenty interesting Riz. That’s why I love you the most,” Kristen says with an air of authority. “And two, you’re going to be doing stuff and meeting people too! You’re having parallel experiences.”

“But he’ll be so far away.”

“Yeah. And then he’ll come back.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely. His mom lives here, he’s gonna come home sometime.”

“Stop being so logical, _Adaine_. I’m trying to wallow here.” Riz picks his head up off the floor so that he can let it fall back down again with a dull thump.

“Oh, sorry,” Kristen says with a laugh. “Recommence your wallow, sir.”

Riz sighs. “Thank you, Kristen. Genuinely.”

“No worries, man. You know I’m always here for you.” Kristen picks at her fingernail absentmindedly. “Are you, uh, still planning on coming with us to see Fabian off tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Riz says, turning to look at Kristen. “Why?”

She shrugs. “I just wasn’t sure if anything had changed. Maybe you thought it’d be too hard to see him or whatever.”

“No, I -,” Riz says, and then stop himself. “I couldn’t do that to him.”

Kristen smiles at him. “Good. ‘Cause he would absolutely freak out and it would be a terrible scene for everyone there.”

Riz laughs, and when it fades he’s bone-tired. Late afternoon sun is streaming through the windows. When did Fabian kiss him goodbye? Ten hours ago? Twelve? It feels like a lifetime, and like no time at all. He’s aged a hundred years since he kissed Fabian, and he’s still in that moment, a millimeter of space between their lips before Fabian pulled back. He racks his brain, and he can remember some conversation that he was on the periphery of, Ayda’s fiery hair and Kristen’s loud t-shirt, and their voices talking about how to be queer is to exist in a liminal space, not quite here and not quite there. He feels that now, he thinks: everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere. It’s strange. It’s unnerving. It’s a mystery. He thinks he could learn to be comfortable here.

-

They go to Fabian’s house to see him off. He’s going to Bastion City today, and from there he’ll be teleported to Fallinel. Riz knows that he’d thought about taking a ship instead, just to honor his roots, but backed off once he realized it was a month at sea. Fabian isn’t a patient person.

Fabian isn’t the only one leaving, but he’s the first and he’s going the farthest and for the longest time, so everyone shows up on his lawn, the whole motley crew. There’s hugs all around and promises to keep in touch now that Gorgug has linked all of their phones to the satellite. Fig tries valiantly to pretend that she’s not crying when she hugs Fabian. Gorgug does not, and cries openly into Fabian’s shoulder. Adaine hugs Fabian hard enough that it looks like it hurts. Kristen’s embrace is softer.

Fabian comes to Riz last of all, and smiles when their eyes meet. “The Ball,” he says, his voice pitched so that only Riz can hear him. “Are you going to miss me while I’m gone?”

“More than you know,” Riz replies, and means it desperately.

Fabian gets down to hug him, so that Fabian’s face is in Riz’s chest and Riz’s can tuck his chin on top of Fabian’s head. Their arms around each other are strong, Riz’s claws dragging at Fabian’s jacket. “Not more than I’ll miss you,” Fabian says, like it’s competition.

“Impossible,” Riz says, shaking his head and feeling Fabian’s hair soft beneath his chin.

“So you think,” Fabian says, pulling back to look at Riz. “You don’t know the kind of missing I’m capable of pulling off.”

Fabian’s eyebrows are raised in a challenge, so Riz takes it. He leans in and kisses Fabian softly, just once. “Take care of yourself, okay?” he says, taking Fabian’s face in his hands. “We’ll uh. We’ll talk about it again once you’re back, okay?”

“Sure don’t you want to ask me to wait for you?” Fabian asks, covering Riz’s hands with his own.

Riz shakes his head. “I wouldn’t ask you to do that. I don’t want you to resent me. Kiss whoever you want. Just - remember me, okay? And when you’re back in Spyre for good... maybe we can try, if we both still want to?”

“You’ll still want to,” Fabian assures him, and Riz has to laugh at that, bright and real.

“Probably,” he admits. “Will you want to?”

Riz barely gets the question out before Fabian kisses him. “Definitely.”

“See you on the other side, then.” Riz immediately misses Fabian’s warmth when he stands up, but doesn’t do anything that might make him seem desperate. He’s proud of himself for that.

“See you,” Fabian echoes, turning and walking towards the trailer his mother had rented for the Hangman and all of Fabian’s baggage. Riz watches as Fabian pulls away from the curb, turns the corner, and disappears. He feels someone step up beside him, a friendly arm go around his shoulders. 

“Are you gonna be okay?” Kristen asks.

“Yeah,” Riz says, looking up at her. “Yeah, I’m gonna be okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> there's a sequel to this bopping around in my head where they do get around to talking about it. would anyone be interested in seeing that?
> 
> come find me on [twitter](http://twitter.com/witchjail)!


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